Serious Sam Fusion, the game hub that allows you to play Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, Serious Sam 3: BFE along with the VR version finally has an update. It's still in beta, but not classed as "Early Access" on Steam.

If you pickup any of those games, it automatically gives you Fusion which is especially good for Linux gamers since some of their titles weren't officially available on Linux but are with Fusion. The Fusion hub also brings Vulkan support, so that's awesome.

Here's the most major changes in the fresh release:

Fusion now has its own menu and game title as default, the game no longer launches with the SS3 menu settings. As such, the SS3 intro now plays when the first level of SS3 is started.

Added new default gamepad layout (classic one is still available as option).

Added a new weapon wheel that slows down time when used to select weapons.

Added a new Bloom system.

Menu now properly scales on 4K resolutions.

Many other smaller changes.

Speaking about how this update to Fusion took so long, going by their news on Steam it was a hotfix way back in February, they said this:

Fusion is a central hub that connects all the main Serious Sam games in one and allows regular and VR players to jump in to the game together. Fusion also brings many improvements to previous games including a brand new engine - the same one Serious Sam 4 will be based on.

This development path brings with it various potential hickups, many of which we have experienced during the preparation of this patch. However, we are finally at a point where Fusion can be branched out as a stand-alone project, so SS4 development will no longer make its code unstable. Unfortunately due to this, the patch will re-download and re-install your game from scratch. With all games available, this makes the download around 12 GB.

Currently it seems to work fine, apart from the graphics options menu crashing to the desktop every time for me. Unsure if it's a bug or a problem on my system but I've let them know anyway.

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morgancoxukDoes this mean the Vulkan renderer (which for me gains 50% fps..) is no longer classed as experimental?

It wasn't considered experimental for a long time as of now. I think, there were an update last year that removed "Beta" marker from the name of the API in the graphics settings, and enabled Vulkan by default on Linux and OpenGL as fallback for old machines.

Still to this day, I think Serious Sam has the most complete options as far as playing anywhere from Single Player to Coop out of any other game. Croteam are just awesome developers, and some of my favorite for sure.

According to comment by Solais (one of Croteam devs), OpenGL renderer was removed in the latest update for Fusion. Now SSF is Vulkan-only on Linux, and so it means that likely SS4 will be Vulkan-only too.

FlabbAccording to comment by Solais (one of Croteam devs), OpenGL renderer was removed in the latest update for Fusion. Now SSF is Vulkan-only on Linux, and so it means that likely SS4 will be Vulkan-only too.

That's cool, sounds like the right move. I'd think they'd drop DX rendering for Windows too, and just go with Vulkan, since the big players should all have decent Vulkan performance. Not sure what they'd do for Mac users though.

FlabbAccording to comment by Solais (one of Croteam devs), OpenGL renderer was removed in the latest update for Fusion. Now SSF is Vulkan-only on Linux, and so it means that likely SS4 will be Vulkan-only too.

That's cool, sounds like the right move.

I wrote my opinion on it further in that thread, and I'll repeat it here for convenience
IMO, it wasn't a wise move from Croteam. OpenGL renderer in SSF was working stable and insanely good on the old hardware. I have an old laptop with Radeon HD 5850 which was running SSF with OGL on medium settings with very high framerates, and now it's not able to run SSF at all.
I understand that they don't want to support OpenGL in their future games, and that's cool, but removing completely working and mature OpenGL renderer from existing games is... Strange, I would say. Probably they would have to do it anyway in the (very) long run as engine gets updates incompatible with their old renderer and old hardware, but definitely not so soon. Too many machines lost ability to run Fusion not because of shiny new tech that Croteam implemented, but just because OpenGL support was suddenly dropped.

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